A fully interactive map showing everyone who follows BBH Labs (@bbhlabs) on Twitter. Also visualized as a heatmap.

Twitter is still something of a mystery to those of us in advertising and marketing. Everyone thinks they need to be on top of it, but no one is completely sure now to use it. Even fewer people have an idea of how to measure whether or not they’re using it effectively. Most of the time brands think about Twitter like this: Create an account, start tweeting, and then measure success by looking at how many followers we have. But that doesn’t tell you the whole story. In fact, that tells you almost nothing.

Here's a little something I wrote up about how to use the Twitter API and Google Fusion Tables to draw insights about those who follow you (and others) on Twitter. It's amazing how much data is publicly available, and the kind of analysis you can do with a few lines of code. If you ever wanted to know how to map 12,000 points on Google Maps, this is your chance to learn how.

Gelocation information provided by modern mobile devices puts analytics data into an entirely new context. Not only do you know what someone did and when, but now you know where. I'm particularly intrigued to see how these kinds of APIs develop in the future, and at what point brands start using public API data to aggressively target their competitors consumers in a very hostile manner. We aren't far away from the breaking point where you can challenge massive incumbent brands by targeting their most vocal consumers right outside of their house.